Identification of disulfidptosis-related genes with immune infiltration in hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common malignant primary tumor that is usually diagnosed at an advanced stage; thus, there is an urgent need for efficient and sensitive novel diagnostic markers to determine the prognosis and halt disease progression in patients with HCC. Disulfidptosis is a recently discovered form of programmed cell death, essentially an abnormal accumulation of intracellular bisulfides. Therefore, our study aimed to investigate the role of disulfidptosis-related genes (DRGs) in the pathogenesis of HCC. Based on public databases, our work demonstrates the relationship between DRG and expression, immunity, mutation/drug sensitivity, and functional enrichment in HCC. We also revealed the significant heterogeneity of HCC in different DRGs sub-clusters and in differentially expressed genes (DEGs), respectively. Subsequently, the most relevant candidate gene, SLC7A11, was screened by machine learning to further validate the significance of SLC7A11 in the clinical features, prognosis, nomogram pattern, and immune infiltration of HCC. Our study, which elucidates the potential mechanisms of DRGs and HCC, reveals that SLC7A11 can serve as a novel prognostic biomarker and provides opportunities and challenges for individualized cancer immunotherapy strategies.

Keywords

• Disulfidptosis
• Hepatocellular carcinoma
• Immune infiltration
• Machine learning
• SLC7A11